


Rot

by blodynbach



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-16
Updated: 2014-05-26
Packaged: 2018-01-16 00:13:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1324534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blodynbach/pseuds/blodynbach
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Of course, he is human. The Outsider forgets."</p><p> A series of short interactions at the shrines of the Outsider, low chaos Corvo compared with high.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Low Chaos

**Author's Note:**

> In one of the shorts I wrote about the game of Nancy - I didn't think it actually HAD any canon rules, but I later looked it up on the wiki to find out that it DOES, so the gameplay is inaccurate in that bit... hmm. Maybe Corvo and the Outsider made up their own rules to it as they went along?

I. The first time Corvo came to the shrines, he’d stumbled in and rammed a chair under the door’s handle. The Outsider had watched with amusement as the frame buckled under the fists of the weepers beyond, as Corvo shored up the splintering wood with the desk of a dead clerk. He could hear the blood frothing in the lungs of the dying. Corvo’s own were full of life and air, scraping in his windpipe.

The Outsider had said hello, and Corvo had not. He never said a lot. That was his way.

But they had sat together, listening to the rats. Corvo cleaned his crossbow, the Outsider watching with tar-black eyes.

 

II. The second time, Corvo Attano was on the way to collect dear prying Sokolov, and had been calling on the Void every step of the way, blinking up the side of buildings and stopping clocks mid-tock. Nobody had known he was there; guards found sleep in his wake. One of them was called Gregor and he would be fired for sloth on shift. Without the income, Gregor’s family would find the city hard and unforgiving as they fell flat upon it, ground down by the heel of inflation and spiraling costs. They would crumble like biscuit, each one breaking away – the daughter to find a man in an alleyway, offering coin at the Golden Cat. She had hoped to be a politician. The son would meet death by the bottle, the child would waste in its crib. The wife, ah, she would flee the isles as she had wished to every night, home to native Tyvia. And the father… where did that leave him?

“Drunk one night, he sleeps in an alleyway,” the Outsider says, “So deep is his stupor, that the guardsmen who were once like kin will think him corpse. In the Flooded District, when he awakes, his tears are clear as mountains streams, augmenting the dense evening air.” He exhales, “Soon they shall be river muck.”

Corvo paces after that, fingering the feathered bolts in the pouch. The Outsider’s words have made him unhappy; the man’s teeth grind like chattering rats.

“Send my love to Sokolov,” the Outsider calls out after him when he leaves.

Corvo calls him cruel.

The Outsider is more reluctant to agree than he expects, and by the time he does the man has left.

 

III. The next shrine Corvo comes across, he does not approach. He has already dug bone from Wrenhaven silt, from the grip of a rotting Overseer, from portraits on aristocrats’ walls. There is no need to approach the hearth of his cruel god.

There is no _want_.

 

IV. “On the way to a party?” the Outsider asks as the man leans up against the wall, taking the cap off a vial of elixir. He is neat, but his lips still ring in a blue stain.

“I hope you’ll have a nice time,” the Outsider says amicably. “It’s been quite a while since your last soiree. You must be careful to remember all your social cues. Do let me know how it goes.”

The inky lips smile then, and Corvo nods a little. He has blood on his gloves and mask, but the Outsider doesn’t point that out. The nobles will think it’s part of the costume. The nobles will think it’s _fabulous_. Of these things, he is certain.

He is not certain that Corvo will come back to him.

(He does.)

(The party has made him shake, worse than the rats and the plague and the prison.)

(The Outsider points out then that there is blood on his hands.)

(…)

(It was the wrong thing to say.)

 

V. He begins to seek the shrines, seeking the Outsider. The conversations grow companionable, Corvo sitting cross-legged on the floor, leaning on a wall, breaking bread with his strange river god.

Sometimes they play Nancy (Corvo is good, the Outsider is good, the games are long). Once Corvo told a joke. It was ok. The Outsider makes lots of them. Corvo understands his humour, but he doesn’t always laugh. The Outsider has to wheedle smiles out of him, like coaxing a stubborn mouse out of a hole.

“A sword house of nobles,” Corvo lays the cards down, “I win.”

“Ah, ah!” the Outsider holds up a finger, “Don’t be so sure – for I have commoners with rats. Plague sweep,” he lays the black set down across the purple drape, then wonders if this will offend the man, current events being what they are.

Corvo surprises him when he _laughs_.

“Playing with a god,” he shakes his head, “What else do I expect?”

“What?”

“Rather _unsubtle_ , don’t you think?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Even the nobility cannot escape the rat plague,” he tosses his cards away, still smiling, “Very droll. Did you really fix the cards just to make that joke?”

“I do not _fix_ anything Corvo, as I do not _cheat_.”

“Of course.”

“I do not!”

“Remind me never to gamble with you,” Corvo says, and the Outsider laughs and means it.

 

VI. In the Flooded District, Corvo staggers over purple drapes awash with blood and grime. The weepers can be heard clawing at the walls, death knocking on the door. Pounding, hammering. Churlishly demanding that Corvo Attano come out here _now_.

Swearwords trickle from lips like raindrops; _fuck fuck fuck, fuck, fuck_. He has called on the Void so many times now, the Outsider feels as though he has made it his home too. But that is not true. Wishful thinking, maybe.

“A rotten place for rotten men,” the Outsider says softly, and Corvo jumps. His heart skitters like a rat.

“Is that why I find myself here?”

The Outsider frowns, but does not reply. _No, of course not_ , he wants to say. _No, you are far too special to be rotten, far too whole to fracture._ But none of that would be true, physically or theoretically or mentally or any way it could be _put;_ Corvo is a wreck. His mind bleeds guilt, his heart chasmed by traitors, skin mapped with a hundred agonies like bloody stars. Even now, pain flows readily, from cuts on his forehead, his lips, his fingers splayed like a macabre fan. Three of them have been broken by falls, and the other hand was trod upon by Daud. _Stomped_ upon, the steel heel coming down on the hand and _twisting_ , pulping the skin and bone into wretched fragments more spider than human. The Outsider knows why. If a hand cannot call, then the Void cannot answer. Daud thinks he has severed Corvo’s bond with his god.

(And thoughts like that are why Daud had always been wrong.)

Corvo makes no sound when the Outsider washes out his wounds with the blue of Piero, except to drag shallow breaths and allow his heart to thrum. The red runs clean and white cloth is wrapped over every cut found until Corvo is more whole than not. Lastly, the god inclines his head to press lips against Corvo’s broken hand, kissing the black spot he put upon the skin. The mark glows gold and _burns_ bright, the light flooding along the highways of bone to the end of each fingertips, knitting skin and flesh and soul back up. The hand clenches, the Void answers.

That night Corvo sleeps in the shadow of the shrine. The Outsider listens to him dream of Emily and a garden of white flowers.

 

VII. Daud had kept a shrine on one of the roofs of the Flooded District. Corvo did not find this one, but it gave the Outsider ample view over the man’s matinee performance. Daud’s was a shrine rarely visited, a shrine kept neat but unloved. The drapes were stolen from a noblewoman in a fit of fancy after a wintry Friday’s assassination in the month of seeds, and they glisten with gold thread as the sun dies in the sky. It is not the only thing ailing here. Daud looks redder than his coat.

 _I’d not ask for you to forgive,_ Daud is saying, _Only to understand_.

Corvo buries his knife in the belly of the assassin, up to the point where the blood washes over his whitened knuckles, warm and wet. Like summer on sea.

“I forgive,” Corvo whispers, and the Outsider does not understand.

 

VIII. The next time they meet, it is almost the last. Corvo finds the shrine in the sewers; water is shaken down from the ceiling by the movement of a tall boy overhead. It slides in fat greasy droplets down the back of his neck.

They speak nothing of the bolts lodged in his chest, nor the infection that has begun to rage there.

The Outsider thinks on how quiet the world will become once Corvo is gone, but knows he will make it to the lighthouse in the end.


	2. High Chaos

I. The tenant block had once been full of weepers, but Corvo gutted the place with all the decorum of a Slaughterhouse Row butcher. He swept the house from top to bottom, pouring the contents of each chest and box over the floor, upending dishes of softly rotten fruit, cracking cupboard doors apart with enough force to rattle the potteries inside. There is something almost hound-like about the manner in which he pans over the skeleton home, searching, _seeking_ –

 “This was once the home of a watercolour painter,” the Outsider tells him. “She painted the Wrenhaven in every season, even when sickness bound her to the bed.”

 Corvo does not respond to that, and silence prickles as his fingers make a cage around the rune laid out on rich cloth. The touch is as one over the Outsider’s skin, and the hands are not warm.

 

II. The first time Corvo Attano met Vera Moray, he had not meant to help her. He had stumbled into her home from the street, fleeing guardsmen with hounds and hate, and had clambered over an iron balcony into the room on the second floor. The Outsider had eavesdropped on his ragged breathing, and then had listened as the woman asked him to scare the thieves away. He had not known what Corvo would do – that was part of the fun of it all – and had been surprised when Corvo agreed with something akin to gallantry. He had quite forgotten Corvo was a gentleman, if not by birth.

 Afterwards they had had gin in teacups, and Vera Moray had given her husband’s bones away. She came down to the Shrine in the afternoon, and asked the Outsider if he’d like a nip of gin too. (Of course, thank you). They spoke of the protector.

 “Did you like him?” the Outsider asks, wrapping bony fingers around the cup.

 “Do you?” Vera replies, her eyes twinkling with lights like the void. She will see no reflection in his.

 “I’m not some petty thing of likes and dislikes. I abide.”

 “Boo,” Vera replies, “I thought he was a charm. As polite as a prince, and you know how I know, dearest one.”

 “A prince of rats, perhaps,” the Outsider says, and the notion troubles him more than he had expected.

 “The rats are not the problem here.”

 To that, he agrees, and they clink their cups together before she fills them back up.

 

III. Corvo wears runes like armour, like the old bone knights of the society that once was. He doesn’t know how similar he has grown to them, and he _would_ know if he listened to the songs. That’s the only place they live now: the great white knights of the circle who worked for death (or _are_ death, possibly) and plucked off sinners one by one. The slum kids still sing the song, linking hands to form a ring, twirling around and around until one of them grows too dizzy to stand and the circle grows a little smaller.

 Emily was singing the song yesterday, but Corvo hadn’t heard.

 He was pawing through the silt in the Hound Pits’ sewers, looking for a new white charm to drape over a hollow chest.

 The Heart mused that there is _something not quite right_ down there, and Corvo took that as a promise there were runes and bones and the good things he sought.

 That was not what the Heart had meant. 

 

IV. “You never struck me as the gambling type,” the Outsider says as the pile of runes and coin glistens at either side of the protector. The river god’s winnings are noticeably smaller, but then he has a rat nest growing in his clutch of cards. He shuffles a Commoner of Sixes, careful to hide the numbers. Soon his prospects may change. The Outsider is looking forward to seeing Corvo lose. They have been playing for a long time.

 “What did I strike you as then? The killing type?”

 The Outsider laughs a little at that. The man might not mean to be, but he _is_ funny. His jokes are always good. “Something along those lines, yes.”

 “I’ll kill you then. One of these days.”

 The Outsider laughs again, louder this time. “I’ll look forward to it,” he says, “It’ll be good to have something for you to do, after Dunwall.”

 “ _After Dunwall_ ,” Corvo mimics, his voice mocking and sour, “Dunwall doesn’t just _end_ because the plague killed the people. The buildings will always be here.”

 “And the rats, I expect,” the Outsider sighs, shuffling his sweep together, taking up a thug card from the pile in the middle. It’s looking good. “Or at least until the sea eats them up.”

 “But then the bricks and stone will only be at the bottom of the water,” Corvo argues, “They’ll still _exist_. And Dunwall will be in them. You can’t eat a city.”

  _Is that a challenge_? The Outsider wonders, and his grin is broken up like glass bottles and fish hooks.

 “Rat nest,” Corvo declares after a moment, tossing the cards down on top of the Shrine they use as a table. The face of the Commoner of Sixes stares up at the Outsider, eyes all bruised and beaten, empty and cold. The same face accuses him from his own hand.

 Corvo collects the last of the runes the Outsider had brought to play with, then glances at the setting sun and decides it’s a good time to pick Sokolov up now the guards’ shifts will be changing. The god tells him ‘ _be careful, dear one!’_ and the look on the man’s face is clearly one of resentment: no, _you_ be careful, old god’. It takes a little longer for the Outsider to get this joke, but when he does he _laughs_ so hard the stars come out.

 

V. Nowadays, the joke isn’t quite as funny as he once found it.

 The man is in the room again, cleaning the blood of a torturer off the heel of his boot. He’d stabbed the man in the heart, then stomped upon his chest so many times his body had burst. The Outsider wonders whether Corvo inherits the murders of all the men he murders too – if so, he must have crushed a hundred people under boot just now. Quaint thought.

 “Once I had a conversation with an old sailor at sea,” the Outsider begins to tell him. “On whether a man can be good or not. He said to me: a man is thirty different things before breakfast, and at least twenty of them are bad. Is that true?”

 No reply.

 “If it is true, I think you must be managing fifty.”

 “I don’t have time for your stories.”

 “That strikes me as unfair, when I make nothing but time for yours.”

 “The Lord Regent matters more to me than you,” Corvo says, and his voice is tired and irritated. As though the Outsider is his least favourite child. “Once done, then –”

 “What’re you going to do, Corvo?” the Outsider asks, “A little dart, in his neck? Something humane?”

 Corvo wipes the blood off his blade, but he wipes it on his coat and the stain clings thick and strong. His stare has something akin in it. “Do not mock me.”

 The Outsider watches as he merges with the rodent swarm already feasting on the Torturer’s wan, warm flesh. A wish takes him, a wish clear and cold that Corvo would _stay_ with the pack and eat the man down to his bones and drink the marrow and be a _monster_ , so then the Outsider may name him as _monster_ and understand the role he is to play in this tale. The Tragedy. Qualities taken too far; death by duty.

 He takes no bite; he is the white rat absconding up the pipe. His fur is so clean.

 

VI. He gives Daud no warning of what Corvo is, only tells him that a hand marked will be the one wrapped around old assassin’s throat by sundown. Daud, being the practical man he is, removes it.

 Corvo, being the savage that he is, sews it back on.

 Corvo, being the savage that he is, crushes Daud’s windpipe until it pops.

 The blood stiffens Daud’s coat, a sight the Outsider has seen a hundred times before. Corvo murdering with his hands is new and should be _exciting_. But the man chokes him long after the assassin has faded, with slippery fingers and little enjoyment. He should’ve mentioned the Empress, said something clichéd about Justice being Done, but there was nothing. Nothing but a stare, nothing but the sound of fingers scrabbling over leather, led on by the thrumming of a heart whispering _bones be here, here be bones._

 It was not much of a show.

 (When evening comes, Corvo rejects Daud’s empty bed for a mattress on the third floor of a dilapidated building. He sleeps fitfully, his subconscious dwelling on images of red and rot. Rats come and go in the night; they eddy about his hands like the tides of Wrenhaven.) 

 

VII. The next time they meet, it is the last.

 Corvo was running through the stomach of the city: through the sewers where corpses walked and flies consumed. He was almost beneath the Hound Pits, having left the Flooded District and its miseries long ago, and he could hear, somewhere in the narrow dark, the humming whisper belonging to the Shrines. The Outsider sends out his call, reaching fingers through black water, but doesn’t expect to be found in this place. The shrine here is very old, built out of the previous city’s bones, and hasn’t been disturbed in a long time. It is known only to rats and flies and fish.

 So when the swarm comes, he thinks nothing of it.

 The rats flow along the pipes, more liquid than beast, black and white and grey and quite vile; he himself finds some repulsion in their numbers and the fetid sewer water which drips from their skin. They run amuck amidst a boy who dragged himself in the hole to die, stripping him down and eating him up, and the butchery which should be typical is not. The boy is screaming and choking as the rats claw at his throat and consume the flesh of sunken cheeks, the boy is wailing and weeping and _drowning_ on his own death, and then a piece of death rises up with him, a piece of the pack stands separate and cold, horror robed in filth and gore and the Outsider _recoils_ at the sight.

 The transition from rat to man is unpleasant and hard: Corvo has to drag himself from the swarm, the black magic thickening the air with cold stench until his bones break back and he becomes upright again. His face is so clean, and he leans on the damp wall of the sewer for support, as though catching breath.

 (Of course; he is human. The Outsider forgets.)

 They talk of the lighthouse, of how Corvo is almost there. Emily will die during the fall with Havelock, both of their chests housing still hearts before the saltwater monsters swallow them whole. The Outsider neglects to mention it.

 “When you’re done, I’d appreciate a favour,” the Outsider says, “Do jump into the sea.”

 “Unlikely,” Corvo replies, “But why?”

 The river god shrugs; “I want to keep your bones safe. They’ll make for excellent runes one day.”


End file.
